A Throw And A Blanket.

A while back I started a throw for my sister. Actually it started out as an experiment and it unintentionally grew from there. There is a fantastic book called "Knitalong" by Larissa Brown and Martin John Brown. Larissa is actually the founder of the ravelry sight. It talks about the virtues of group knitting and has some fantastic patterns in there too. I loved this book when I first bought it a few years ago. I read it from cover to cover but never did try out any of the patterns. On ravelry I saw that someone had done the Barn-Raising quilt from the book (actually lots of people have but someone had done it recently). I love the idea of knitting squares and turning them into throws and blankets. Just haven't done any yet. I decided to try out the square pattern. I had no intentions of doing more than try it at that point. I picked up some regia 4ply sock yarn I had bought on sale although I wasn't a fan of those colours together (red, pink and orange). It was so easy to do and I knew straight away that it was going to be addictive. I just loved the idea that knitting on the round would become a square. So of course I kept going.

The quilt itself is supposed to be made up of lots of these squares stitched together. The idea is that you yourself or a group of you knit up these squares using left over sock yarn. Brilliant! Although I already have a plan for my leftover sock yarn. So I kept going. I decided to knit a throw out of one large square. I wanted to see how it affected the striping of the yarn as it grew. This of course meant that I had to order more yarn and 2 balls of 50g sock wool is not enough for a throw. I used up 7 balls and it's big enough to use as a lapghan. To prevent the edging from curling I used a simple garter stitch border. I love it so much I now have the yarn to do two more for friends and I have a third planned in my head. I don't want to take credit for originality here though. If you type in Barn raising quilt into the ravelry search engine you will see that a number of people have knitted the large square.

In the same week I have another finish. I bought a baby tweed blanket pattern by Brooklyn Tweed from the ravelry site a while ago. I love his designs (and am getting to do one of his classes in August, yeah!). I am sure I blogged about starting this a while ago. It's a basic garter stitch square with a fern and fan stitch edging. It was unusual enough that I decided to knit for a friend who will be having a baby shower soon. I had originally wanted to knit it up in navy and cream but the store didn't have navy tweed yarn so I opted for green and natural tweed. It's easy to knit and the pattern was very easy to follow. I unfortunately can't count so despite the pattern telling me how many yards of yarn I would need I miscalculated. I got half way through the border and ran out of the natural colour. The store had also ran out. After ordering both colours online I was able to get back on it over the weekend. I love how it turned out and hope my friend will like it. If I am honest though I would do it again in the colours I originally wanted. Unfortunately there isn't enough time for that.